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Preserved Carrots
5 lbs. carrots. Lemons Almond extract Wash, but do not scrape, five pounds of young carrots, boil them till tender in boiling salted water, then drain, peel, and mash to a fine pulp. To every pound of the pulp allow one and a half pounds of sugar, six blanched and shredded almonds, the grated rind and strained juice of two lemons, and half a teaspoonful of almond extract. Put the pulp and sugar into an earthenware pan and cook together for a quarter of an hour; remove from the fire and add the almonds,
A carrot jam of the old school, sweetened at a ratio no modern preserver would use by accident. The text breaks off mid-sentence after the almonds go in, so the finishing and potting steps are missing; treat what survives as the cooking method and handle storage yourself.
- The hinge: sugar ratioOne and a half pounds of sugar to one pound of carrot pulp is what makes this keep at all — carrots have almost no acid of their own. Cutting the sugar turns it from a preserve into a sweetened vegetable puree that must be treated as a perishable.
- Weigh after mashingThe five pounds is raw, unpeeled carrots; the sugar is calculated on the weight of the cooked, peeled, mashed pulp. Weigh the pulp before adding sugar rather than working from a fixed figure; the loss to trimming and peeling is modest, so the sugar will run to several pounds.
- Earthenware panThe recipe calls for an earthenware pan, presumably chosen because it does not react with the lemon juice. A heavy stainless or enamelled cast-iron pan does the same job.
- A quarter of an hourThe recipe gives fifteen minutes for the pulp and sugar together. Sugar this concentrated catches easily, so stir and keep the heat moderate rather than walking away for the full time.
- Boil unscraped, peel afterThe carrots go into the water unscraped and are peeled after cooking; the skins slip off under a cloth or your thumb once drained. The salted water is for cooking the carrots, not for seasoning the jam.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon of modern almond extract is potent, and its aroma is volatile; add it off the fire with the almonds, as the truncated text implies, or the top note cooks away. Only six shredded almonds to the pound is texture rather than flavour.
- Storage, since the recipe does not sayThe instructions stop before potting. Low-acid vegetable preserves are not candidates for improvised shelf canning — refrigerate in clean jars and use within a few weeks, or freeze. If you want a shelf-stable version, follow a current tested carrot-preserve process rather than reconstructing this one.
- Yield and useThis makes a great deal of jam; halving is sensible. It is sweet enough to be used as a tart filling or spread thinly on plain bread rather than spooned like a fruit conserve.
Carrot preserves belong to a long European habit of treating the carrot as a sweet — it has enough natural sugar to stand in for fruit, and cooks used it that way when fruit was scarce or expensive. Jams of this type, perfumed with lemon and almond, have been likened to apricot preserve, the almond and citrus doing the work of a fruit that was expensive or out of season; the resemblance is traditional rather than exact.